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The Road to Wellville

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
In this “wildly funny” (People) novel, an eccentric cast of characters navigates a world obsessed with health and longevity—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain.
 
“Boyle’s send-up of dietary fanaticism cleverly reminds us of the extremes to which Americans will go in pursuit of perfection.”—Glamour
 
The year is 1907, and the boom town of Battle Creek, Michigan, is attracting a formidable array of visitors—the rich, the preposterously rich, and the merely famous, from California, Chicago, New York, and even Europe. What draws them to this place? And what inspires them to trade in their steaks and oysters, their martinis and champagne, for a diet of bran and yogurt and a regimen of five enemas a day? Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of course, inventor of the corn flake, peanut butter, and the coffee substitutes that have ruined so many a bright morning.
 
Will Lightbody is a man with an undiagnosed stomach ailment whose only sin is loving his wife too much. Eleanor Lightbody, despite her upper-crust credentials, her capability and beauty, is a health nut of the first stripe—and when she journeys to Dr. Kellogg’s infamous Battle Creek Spa to live out the vegetarian ethos, poor Will goes too.
 
Wickedly comedic, The Road to Wellville overflows with a Dickensian cast of characters—all in search of the magic pill to prolong their lives, or the profit to be had from manufacturing it.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 3, 1993
      Each time out, Boyle ( World's End ; East Is East ) aims for a new target, and this time he has hit the bull's - eye. Wellville is a rich plumcake of a book, full of ripely conceived characters, satire both broad and bitter, beautifully integrated period atmosphere and writing that is colorful but considered. Set in Battle Creek, Mich., in the early years of the century, it evokes the days of C. W. Post and Will Kellogg, when fortunes were being made and lost in the national rage for the new breakfast cereals. Will's brother, John Harvey Kellogg, was an early diet devotee; to his hugely successful Battle Creek Spa came the flower of American business and society to trim their waistlines, work out and eat the kind of healthy, tasteless foods sadly recognizable to any weight watcher today. Kellogg, a showman par excellence, ran it like a small but ruthless dictatorship. Among his clients the winter of 1907, in Boyle's fictionalized account, are Will and Eleanor Lightbody, he a decent man wasting away at the urging of his fanatical wife; among the hopefuls struggling to make their names in the cereals business is engaging young ne'er-do-well Charles Ossining. How all their paths cross, how Will saves his ghastly marriage and Charles almost goes to jail but is rescued at the 11th hour and ultimately makes his pile: Boyle has woven all this into a tale told with the broad humanism and compassionate eye of a great 19th-century novelist. Truth and fiction are invisibly blended in Boyle's splendid novel, in which a loving concern for the innocent at heart touchingly prevails. 100,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; film rights to Alan Parker/Beacon Pictures; first serial to Rolling Stone; author tour; BOMC selection.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 2, 1994
      Boyle's wickedly funny spoof of the turn-of-the-century health spa craze is packaged in a 50,000-copy ``cereal boxed'' edition.

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  • English

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